About namestack

namestack is a free, fast explorer for every baby name registered in England & Wales since 1996, with full year-by-year popularity history for over 41,000 names.

Where the data comes from

Every name and count on namestack is sourced from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) annual baby names release for England & Wales. The ONS publishes the underlying data each year as part of the baby names statistics dataset.

Coverage

• Years: 1996 onwards, updated each year as ONS publishes the next release.
• Geography: England & Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland publish separately).
• Names: every name that has appeared in any ONS release in this window — including names no longer registered today.

The “≤ 2” suppression rule

ONS does not publish exact counts for names with two or fewer babies in a given year, to protect the privacy of small groups of families. Where a name was given to one or two babies in a year, namestack shows “≤ 2” rather than a number — the data is not missing, it is intentionally suppressed.

How rankings are calculated

The rank shown for each name is the official ONS rank for that year, based on count of registrations within its sex (Boys / Girls). 10-year change is computed as the percentage change between counts in the most recent year and ten years prior, using only years where both counts are above the suppression threshold.

Known limitations

• Spelling variants are treated as separate names (e.g. Aaliyah and Aliyah).
• Some ONS records contain trailing punctuation; namestack collapses obvious duplicates (e.g. Olivia and Olivia-) into a single entry.
• Names registered fewer than 3 times each year for their entire history are not present in the dataset.

Get in touch

Spotted a bug or have an idea? Email hello@namestack.co.uk.